Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms (20 page)

“Once you go black, you can’t go back,” she said.

Like being face-to-face with one’s executioner, I continued to stare at her in amazement, as much to take her in as to be prepared for the moment she leaped across the table to eat me. Slowly, not making any sudden movements, and without taking my eyes off her, I began to reach for the sausages that someone had thoughtfully gone to the trouble of microwaving to a blackened char.

She glanced down at my efforts to assemble a breakfast without actually watching what I was doing and seemed amused by it. More food skidded across the table than wound up on my plate, and after a moment, I smiled at her and set my ‘breakfast’ before me. Buttered napkin ring, pile of sugar, and morning paper, all generously covered in salt.

“Don’t you have a butler?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t he…like…feed you or something?”

“Only if I hold a gun to his head.”

She laughed somewhat—a sharp burst of sound. Or maybe she burped. It really could have been either. “Funny too,” she said as if that sealed the deal. What deal I have no idea, but an important deal of
some
kind.

Her tongue danced out again, exploring for more lost food, or perhaps passing insects.

“I’ll feed you,” she said, smiling with intense sexuality, the words sounding more like, ‘Suck my tits, please.’

Morgan’s mouth fell open in horror. Clearly he considered Ms. Waboombas
his
territory.
His
discovery. Even more clearly, she had already been
well
explored long before our arrival by other, far more daring adventurers, and was, in reality, ‘No Man’s Land’.

“Thanks. I’m good,” I said, frightened and trying to change the subject. “You know—Morgan’s never mentioned you. Have you two known each other long?”

“No.”

I waited. But she said nothing more and returned to eating and leering, as if ‘no’ was answer enough, which it really wasn’t.

“Well—how long
have
you known one another?”

“We met last night. At the club. So we’re not attached or anything.”

She flicked her tongue again, and realization slowly seeped into the important parts of my brain.

“The club?” I asked, suddenly more frightened. Morgan looked away nervously. “The
club
…?” I repeated, remembering his requested destination of the previous evening. Like a bat to my skull, it exploded into my head. Instantly, things made much more sense. A terrifying kind of sense. But sense.

“Yeah,” Ms. Waboombas said, winking at me again. “The club where I work. It was a slow night last night. Not even any reason to get up and dance, let alone get naked. So we got to talking, him and me. Normally I don’t like the customers, but Morgan’s all right sometimes. He’s into comics.”

“Comics? You like
comics
?” I asked, cutting my buttered newspaper and becoming more shocked by the second. In my seemingly endless lifetime, I’d never met a woman who enjoys comics, other than in the abstract—except manga perhaps, but that’s not really ‘comics’ as ‘comics fans’ think of them—and I’ve known even fewer who look like Ms. Waboombas. Yes, fewer than…um…‘none.’ It’s possible. Negative numbers exist for a reason. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: she was actually quite attractive, though in a predatory sort of way, and that made her comics interest all the more unusual.

“Sure, I like ‘em,” she said. “They show women in a positive light. Sexy and tough.” She pumped a fist in that ‘sexually alluring to Mastodons’ kind of way. “Built.” She took another spoonful of food but didn’t let that interfere with her talking. “I write my own.”

She leaned back to show off her costume, dripping milk down the front of it. The front of it being mostly breast matter. “This is my character. War Woman.” She smiled, obviously proud of…well…
everything
.

I studied the design more closely. It was made from some kind of metallic fabric, decorated with random weapons, and featured, primarily, a lot of empty space. She had two unusual circular objects at the center of each tightly fitting bra cup, and I focused on them, curious as to what their design represented. After a moment or two of intense study—which she seemed to thoroughly enjoy—I realized the decorations were what doctors sometimes refer to as ‘
areolas
’.

Ms. Waboombas wasn’t wearing a ‘costume’. She was covered in body paint.

I made a sound—not unlike a horror-stricken little girl—and dropped my spoonful of sugar-salted newspaper. Then I turned my eyes back up to Ms. Waboombas face, and she laughed—or burped— again.

“Yeah,” she said to me, beaming. “Morgan helped me brush it on this morning. I can tell
you
like it.”

Morgan—popping another muffin into his mouth— smiled at me as though he could die—right now—a happy and deeply fulfilled human being.

Ms. Waboombas stood up—all six-foot-plus of her—and left a paint imprint of her muscular backside on my dining room chair.

“Looks good, don’tcha think?”

She meant what was left on
her
, not on the chair.

Slowly, she turned side-to-side, then once all the way around, completely, as if she were modeling actual clothes. It was a different kind of fantasy look from the one I was used to working with every day. Manschingloss would have run screaming from the room, viciously clawing his eyes out. Of course, he was gay, so fashion was far more important to him than raw, steaming, feminine sexuality. Still—the point is—her ‘outfit’ was not something that would have been approved for sale at Wopplesdown Struts. Or even to clean the floors there for that matter. Besides, the only pieces of actual cloth in the ‘costume’ were strap shoes; a bandana tied around one thigh; several belts, which gave support to her various, arcane weaponry; and a thong. The rest was nothing but shaved, painted skin.

Tough to package for worldwide distribution I have to say.

It did, however, do a marvelous job of showing off the stately Ms. Waboombas. She really was a magnificent specimen of womanhood who obviously worked out with actual weights. Had I not spent the previous night wanking myself dry, little Corky would have been thumping out Morse code against the underside of the table.

“Wanna touch it?” she asked with steam.

“I wouldn’t want to smudge the delicate line work,” I said.

“I have touch-up paint.”

“Oh, come on!” Morgan said, fidgeting angrily.

“Really…” I said, “…it’s probably best if I don’t.”

“Says you,” she responded with obvious disappointment.

“He’s getting married!” Morgan repeated.

“I just wanted to see how well the paint holds up,” she said defensively. “It’s gonna get a lot of contact at the convention, so it’s important to know.”

“Contact? The convention?” I asked, getting worried. “You’re going to…to the comic book convention?”

“Yeah,” Morgan said enthusiastically. “She’ll be riding down with us.”

“She will? With us? Oh,
really
?” I said, feeling as if I had been strapped into an electric chair and was currently having electrodes and damp sponges applied to my bare skin.

“Well. How marvelous. That should make for a
much
more…em…pleasant drive,” I lied.

“Probably,” she said, still disappointed at being untouched by human hands. “Sooo . . . you wanna see my book?”

“Book? What book?”

“My comic book.”

“You have a comic book?”

“You think I’m dressing this way for fun?”

I did, yes. But shook my head ‘no’ because her tone made me fear doing otherwise.

“It’s just to help me sell my books,” she said.

‘Books’ is shortened slang for ‘comic books’ within the superhero comic book community. It didn’t mean actual books with words in them. In Ms. Waboombas case, I imagined very few words would have been necessary. Or helpful. And from my past knowledge of comics conventions and the men who attend them, I determined that—dressed as she was—she could likely make vast wads of dough selling blank pages. Or even just the promise of them.

“So, you wanna see it?”

“See what?” I said, confused due to having become lost again in Ms. Waboombas costume. It was hard to imagine there was something I wasn’t seeing.

“My
book!”
she said, getting annoyed.

“Oh! Right! Sure! Absolutely!” I said, genuinely interested, but not for the reasons she supposed. Her smile brightened and for the first time seemed sincere. She sat down again, smearing body paint deeper into the woodwork of my Louis the 14
^th
chair, and reached under the table to pull a copy of her comic from one of several in a canvas bag at her feet. She handed it to me gingerly, as if it were spun from the finest gold.

“I printed it myself,” she said proudly. “Place in Hong Kong. They speak English there, sometimes. I think it looks nice.” She smiled again, and—handoff complete—returned to shoveling food in her mouth. The woman had an appetite. But then she had two hungry breasts to feed.

I set her comic on the table, and she immediately began to spasm at her end. Food, and milk spluttered out of her mouth, spilling across lips, chin, and breasts. It took a moment to realize she wasn’t having a seizure—she was just concerned about where I was placing her comic.

“
There’s milk!”
she finally managed to shout, spewing more food—pretty much everywhere.

I jerked her masterpiece off the table as if it were a small child reaching for a hot stove and saw that there were, indeed, a few small drops of milk on the surface before me, likely having been spat there by Ms. Waboombas herself.

Seeing that her baby was now safe, she calmed and returned to eating, and talking through her food. “You want it to stay mint. Could be worth money someday.”

As opposed to not being worth money today?
I thought, and thankfully had the sense not to say out loud. Instead, I smiled insincerely and turned my attention down to the thing in my hands.

It was a typical ‘independent comic’ with superhero contents that were pretty much the same as the two major companies—Marvel or DC—but with more violence, less talent, and no inside color—all at a higher price. The art was vintage, bad, imitation
Image
—a company renowned during its inception for their large-breasted female characters, and seemingly willful absence of any actual writing ability. The drawings were each meticulously created with excessive amounts of line and detail that seemed
almost
to indicate actual form and substance—but not quite.

Beneath the logo on the cover, the main character, War Woman, who looked only vaguely like the actual Ms. Waboombas, was drawn in all her semi-naked glory, using her sword to behead a fat, doughy looking gentleman wearing a velour jogging suit. As if to prove he was somehow a ‘bad guy’ his severed head wore sunglasses, and the rest of him was bedecked with a staggering amount of cheap looking jewelry, all rendered with lots of shiny ‘glint’ marks.

Oh, and he carried a gun.

In the background of the cover there were two or three (the art was unclear) semi-naked women tied to some kind of torture device that—apparently in order to operate—must first remove the victim’s clothing in a rending fashion that leaves just enough shredded bits of material to obscure nipples and pubic hair from the view of any stray parents who might be wandering, lost, through the comic book store displaying it. In the foreground, the ‘villain’ (please, God, don’t let him be a rich, innocent fashion executive) clenched wads of money in his soon-to-be-dead, non-gun-toting hand. There was an amazing amount of blood everywhere, and—though you’d think it physically impossible—War Woman’s breasts were actually
larger
than the real Ms. Waboombas’. In her secret identity she must be a flotation device.

“In her secret identity, she’s a stripper. Like me,” said Ms. Waboombas, correcting my internal monologue and making me fear she could read minds. “The guy she’s killing is a club owner who takes advantage of the girls in the back room, then steals their money,” she continued, then apparently reading my distaste. “He deserved it.”

“Oh, I’m sure he did,” I said smiling, and double-checking the proximity of—and direction to—all nearest exits.

“Inside,” she said, “we learn he’s got a little dick. At the end, War Woman cuts it off and feeds it to him.”

I crossed my legs.

“Would that be before or
after
she beheads him?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

“After,” she told me, as if it happened every day before lunch. Twice during.

“How very
Sin City
,” I said.

She pointed at me and winked in a ‘gotcha’ kind of way. “Frank Miller. Love him. He’s got the right idea. People love seeing dicks cut off.”

Not really.

She picked something out of her teeth with an impossibly long fingernail. Whatever she was reaching for was so far back in her mouth, it was practically in her stomach. As she dug, she continued sucking at stray bits of blackened sausage flesh. The combination of sight and sound was simply enchanting.

I briefly thought to ask if her War Woman ‘story’ had any basis in fact, and if she had any wants or warrants, then quickly realized I couldn’t face it if any of the answers were ‘yes’. I strip-mined my brain in an effort to remember if I’d heard anything about headless strip club owners who’d been fed their own penises, miniscule or otherwise, and didn’t recall anything of substance. Not that it would have been in the sports or comics sections. I really should read more of the ‘news’ parts of the newspaper. It was now scaldingly apparent—as my fifth grade teacher had always said about math— that it really did have applicable uses in real life.

“I got a customer of mine to draw it,” Ms. Waboombas explained, still tooth-picking. I began to wonder if there might be a whole pig stuck in there. “He’s in love with me, so he did it cheap. His dad’s somebody.”

I waited. Then asked: “Somebody…?”

“…Famous in comics. I’m pretty sure.” She turned and looked off into the distance scowling. “Or maybe he’s the one whose dad was the dude they based ‘Natural Born Killers’ on.” She turned back to me and shrugged, then went back to roto-rootering her teeth. “Can’t remember.”